The generally agreed etiquette when interviewing celebrities with, some – how shall we say - history, is that you go in gently. Start perhaps with a little fluffy questioning about whatever new product, religion or diet they’re currently plugging, in the hope that if you show sufficient good will, they’ll relax and open up about themselves.
No one, however, seems to have sent this particular memo to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who veers so far off plug during our interview, that at various points I feel honour-bound to wrest the conversation round to Desiderata – the label of Oxford shirt-cum-bodies (or kubbis) which she recently launched.
But she’s not ready to talk about cuffs and snap fastenings yet.
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| Harvard Navy Kubbi, £195, Desiderata London |
Three minutes into our meeting, she is demonstrating etiquette of another nature. I think it’s how to get out of a Lamborghini without flashing your knickers (clamp knees together at every swivel), but since she is simultaneously telling me about the oral sex lessons she received from a celebrated Madame, it’s not unambiguously clear.
Nor is it certain whether she learned these valuable life skills while at one of her finishing schools or later. The discreet staff in Blakes Hotel take all this in their stride. The restaurant is practically empty, although it is mid-lunch time. They won’t be making much from TPT either, who has one banana milk throughout, while a good natured make-up artist, who has worked with Tara “for ever”, and I have tea and water.
I don’t get the chance to ask whether this is her normal sustenance. Suffice to know that, tightly held in by one of her kubbis and an old Alexander McQueen tweed skirt, she’s as strikingly slender and nut-brown as the “notorious” It Girl who dominated all those column inches in the 1990s.
Back then it seemed that Tara was omnipresent. Daughter of Patti (an Anglo-Argentine–Brazillian beauty) and Charles Palmer -Tomkinson (former Olympic skier) and sister to the virtuous Santa, who under her married name of Sebag Montefiore went on to become a successful novelist. She starred in Walker’s Crisps ads, on Tatler covers, attended openings great and small and was a runner-up on I’m a Celebrity. Yah! the title of her weekly column in The Sunday Times (ghost written by Wendy Holden, who cited PT as a major inspiration for a subsequent string of best selling social satires) was a literary landmark of sorts, pre-empting an era clogged with celebrity endeavours.
Her partying days are far behind her. Her appearance at the Royal Wedding in 2010 (the Palmer-Tomkinsons are close friends of Prince Charles’s) was the first most of us had seen of her for years. “I designed that dress you know. It looks quite simple, but underneath it was like Piccadilly Circus.”
source by :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/tara-palmer-tomkinson-on-why-her-new-fashion-range-is-for-everyo/
